„LinkedIn, for people who don’t blanch at using network as verb.“

Public-facing social media tends to be geared toward IRL friends, as with Facebook, or toward strangers we would like to be connected to for professional reasons — Twitter, for journalists; Instagram, for would-be bloggers and influencers; LinkedIn, for people who don’t blanch at using network as verb. On these platforms, strategic personal branding in images and slogan-like bursts of text took over from baroquely constructed bildungsromans.

But the intrusion of wider market forces — the capitalist appropriation of personal self-expression as a vehicle to sell oneself as product — has also rendered the story we tell about ourselves online less unfiltered, less governed by our wants and more by how we want (and perhaps even financially need) others to see (and hire, and like) us. The part of our online performances that serve as a résumé can seem inseparable from the parts that are expressive or aspirational.

The irony that is so necessary to my “personal brand,” the half-intentional dissonance that comes when contrasting my Facebook photos of drunken outings with the articles I post on LinkedIn, is at once freeing and disarming: The more I am able to be myself through the refractions and juxtapositions that online presence across platforms affords us, the less I feel I can safely mean what I say.